So 2010 ends with us talking about transparency, secrets revealed and ministers entrapped in the name of openness.
The Romans would have smiled that Janus - their two-faced god of the year's end and beginning - still had a bit of poke.
And at the irony of it all.
The old 'transparency is the new objectivity' canard waddled its way back on stage; the Wikileaks saga (with all that word's Nordic overtones) rests at a seasonal caesura; and the Daily Telegraph snared itself in its own trap.
There's a lot to take in.
Torin Douglas has written on this blog about the Telegraph's predicament - which would be funny in an Arkwright finger-trapping kinda way if it wasn't so serious.
There's a massive problem with journalists entrapping their subjects - and 'it's in the name of transparency' just won't do. Not as a complete answer, anyway. That applies as much to Wikileaks as it does to the Telegraph.
It's blindingly obvious that 'transparency' is as elusive an idea as 'truth' or 'objectivity' - and one we should be just as wary of.
Entrapment, secret recording don't in and of themselves deliver a 'truth' of some higher order; aren't guaranteed because of what they are to deliver that elusive pellucid glimpse of something more founded in veracity that the word 'transparency' seems to promise.
They might do that - especially in answer to direct questions that we couldn't otherwise ask. Questions to which we already have much of the answer.
But, as we know, people romance, boast, misrepresent themselves and others, flirt, strain to impress ... exhibit every human failing in conversations they think are private. Especially when they're egged on by those they're talking to. Especially when those they're talking to are journalists on a fishing trip.
Entrapment is inherently unjust. It's why investigative journalism that reveals unsafe convictions where the accused has been fitted-up is such an important part of what we do.
And it's why, as Torin sets out, we journalists allow ourselves to trap our quarry only if there's a good reason. In the BBC's case, you need overwhelming prima facie evidence of real wrongdoing and no alternative way of clinching the story; on a newspaper, something more flimsy will do ... but it's still there, in the code. On paper and in theory.
Code aside, it's hard to understand why the Telegraph thought it was worth secretly recording Vince Cable - and the other Lib Dem ministers - voicing grumbles that anyone within 500 miles of Westminster must already be aware of. That he's (they're) not 100% thrilled with all he's (they've) had to chew on these past six months.
Nor why it was worth 'revealing' that coalition government means you sometimes have to defend in public things that make you uncomfortable in private.
The revelations are underwhelming - if David Heath's comment that George Osborne "has a capacity to get up one's nose" is news, then you should hear what one Conservative MP opined to me about the Chancellor last week.
Clue: the orifice concerned wasn't nasal.
Why?
One suspects the answer to the question 'why did you do it?' would be 'because we could' ... that and to inflame the grumbling appendix of Telegraph readers who've forgotten no-one won an overall majority at the last election and can't be doing with Cameron's coalition baloney.
Which is perhaps why the Telegraph missed the only story it fell against - well, either that or chucked it around like a primed grenade for 24 hours until a whistleblower did the decent thing and told Robert Peston about it.
And that's one of the problems with transparency. If you're pleading it to further your cause, you've got to be, well, transparent about it - you can't hide, or lose, the stuff that's difficult for you.
Which is where John Humphrys' (excellent) interview with the (distinctly odd and getting odder) Julian Assange comes in.
Thanks to this interview, we now know that Assange's theory of transparency doesn't apply to Assange. That a "gentleman" isn't "transparent" about aspects of his own life ... even if that "transparency" would add significantly to our understanding of one of the biggest stories of 2010.
You're left wondering whether he, his followers and his organisation would cut a "gentleman" President or Prime Minister the same slack.
Muddle
We're in a muddle about transparency.
Going undercover, subterfuge and secrets have always been part and parcel of journalism and long may that continue to be so.
It's without question one of journalism's most important functions to reveal what's true and significant about what power is doing in our name - and that will mean leaks and contacts and whistleblowers and and and ...
Wikileaks challenges our ideas of revelation, however.
The scale of the three big document dumps in 2010 lures us into representing them as a 'truth' for no other reason than that they were previously secret. A 'truth' - if you subscribe to Julian Assange's characterisation of broken politics and media - hidden from us by an inherently evil conspiracy between power and journalism.
Yet we know those millions and millions of words are themselves a tiny fraction of anything that can be called the 'truth'. Their initial secrecy and subsequent revelation may be a good thing, but that's no guarantee of evidential quality on its own.
The muddle at the Telegraph is a small-scale version of the same thing. The notion that going undercover and subterfuge are ends in themselves rather than means to ends.
Sometimes - and I've done this - you just have to dump your story and your secret recordings when they fail to give you the evidence you need, or - as in the Telegraph's case - fail to tell you anything of consequence.
Unlike Janus, we can't see both ways - back into the old year and ahead into the new. But it's a reasonable guess that we'll still be muddled over this transparency thing in 365 days time.
And that the only difference will be that by the end of December 2011 we'll have more to chew on.
